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Daily Discussion Thread: 🚵 Tuesday, July 02, 2024
(aussie.zone)
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this post was submitted on 01 Jul 2024
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Lodged my tax return this morning. Took like 5 minutes
That's how you know I'm poor
When they're like "you got any investments bro? What about income from dividends? Don't know what a dividend is? Oh, just put down "no" then, you poor fuck"
I've always loved the question to the effect of, "have you received any tips?" 🤣
I took an old mattress to the tip; does that count? 😂
On the other hand when you have to answer "yes" it starts opening up a bunch of complicated questions to wade through. I put a small amount of money into some investment funds a couple of years ago and now I get to wade through a whole bunch of extra questions, all over tiny amounts of money. It's all stuff like $20 of franking credits, $2.31 in foreign investment offsets and $6 of capital gains. I'm looking forward to hitting the age I can access Super and can just shove money in there and take it out tax free without all the hassle.
The last time I did my tax that quickly I realised later I missed something and had to do an amendment. Turns out it meant the tax refund I had already received was higher than it should have been, so I had to repay the ATO 8c.
Modern tax return stuff is so good how it already knows about all of my dividend and interest payments etc. Most things are auto-filled but I just need to crack open my google doc I keep with my expenses I put in and keep track of purchases I can claim, whack that stuff in there, get briefly mad at how much tax I pay every year and then hit submit. Probably takes me about 10 minutes. 15 with a double-check of everything.
It's certainly a massive improvement on the old paper forms. The early electronic lodgements were also basically just the paper form online, all of this automatic stuff makes it so much easier.
Before I came to Australia I had this impression that tax was Awful and Complicated and A Nightmare - primarily from American media - and this was before I was old enough to have needed to file a tax return.
Only to find out it's a total breeze here.
Operative phrase there is 'american media'.
I think USA has the additional complication of having both State and Federal income taxes. There also seem to be a lot of things that can be deductable there that don't apply here - like mortgage payments on your own home and the value of donations given to charity (not just money, but stuff like old clothes you drop off at the op shop!). Plus they have the option to file a joint tax return as a couple instead of being treated as two individuals, which is beneficial in some circumstances but not others.
I has a quick look and plugged in some travel expenses since I started travelling off site at work and some other deductions.
This year thankfully is looking better than last year’s estimate.